pdf submit not working

  • The title should be ‘how make pdf submit work”. Simply stated, I present the user with a pdf fillable file. The user is supposed to fill the fields, and then click the “submit” button to mail the file to us.

    The fillable file is prepared with Acrobat “prepare a form” Function, the submit button is defined with action “Submit a form” and the url set to mailto:[email protected], xyz being the site domain (this email address works fine). Unfortunately clicking submit, the only result is

    ERROR

    Form data cannot be submitted to provided server

    My idea is that I misinterpreted many internet suggestions (see for example https://community.adobe.com/t5/acrobat-discussions/interactive-pdf-to-be-email-using-wordpress/m-p/10018036) and that this is simply not possible and the task is much more complicated. Can somebody address me to the right solution, assuming one exists?

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  • Hi, @roberto21 ???? Using mailto: requires that the browser (and in this case, the PDF viewer) supports this action, which in my experience has mixed results across clients. While easy to implement, it’s not very reliable, as you’ve found. For example, on my computer, Chrome handles mailto: links, but it’s not attached to a particular site/action, so just opens the browser and doesn’t do anything else.

    It might be worth investigating some form or PDF plugins that can support your use case. It would be more robust for WordPress to accept the submitted form/PDF, and then for WordPress to store/send the file via email (or perhaps just a link to the file stored on the site) — this way you don’t need to rely on the client’s questionable support of mailto: links. You should also be able to restrict submitted files by PDF and a maximum size to limit unwanted submissions.

    Thread Starter roberto21

    (@roberto21)

    Thank you for your answer. It is true that when something is too good (or easy) to be true, it probably isn’t. My browser is Chrome, the extension (PDF viewer) is “Adobe Acrobat: PDF edit, convert, sign tools”, and still doesn’t work. I noticed that on other browsers the Submit button is simply ignored, so you can.t rely on this method working in the user’s browser, even assuming it worked on mine.
    What I found is an add-on of Contact Form 7 that can map the fields on a form to the fields in the pdf form, and then mails the pdf as attachment. I will try, even if for the user it would be more natural and immediate to fill the pdf fields directly. Thanks again for your kind attention.

    I’m glad you found a potential solution. Another workflow I’ve seen is for a fillable PDF to be opened in the browser, the user fills it out and saves it to disk, and then uploads the completed PDF through a form. It adds a couple steps, but might feel more like “filling in the form”.

    Let us know what you tried and how it worked out!

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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